Civil society calls for Universal Access to TB/HIV Care

Signs on the civil society Letter to the Governments of the World who will convene for the

First HIV TB Global Leaders’ Forum,

New York (9 June 2008)

So far 84 organizations from 39 countries have joined this civil society letter calling for universal access to TB/HIV care to stop the biggest killer of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world... please join by sending your ORGANIZATIONAL endorsement to:

Matt Kavanagh at mkavanagh@results.org by WEDNESDAY JUNE 4th.

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Open Letter to the Governments of the World:

As leaders gather in New York for the “Global Leaders Forum on TB/HIV,”

we write as civil society groups, advocates, researchers, and groups of people living with TB and HIV from around the world to demand concrete action on TB and HIV.

We express our collective outrage that TB, despite being curable for over a half century, continues to be the leading cause of death of People Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWH/A). We call on governments and multilateral institutions to take bold and concrete action—and commit ourselves to the same—to ensure that every person in need receives high quality TB and HIV treatment, prevention, diagnostics and care.

Enclosed here you will find a call to action from Civil Society—as we add our voices to the leaders gathered in New York June 9^th . In 2006, the UN Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS called for “accelerated scale-up of collaborative activities on tuberculosis and HIV, in line with the Global Plan to Stop TB.” Since then some nations have seen major scale-up, but the vast majority of people with TB/HIV co-infection still do not have access to coordinated services.

The world must treat TB/HIV as the crisis that it is. In Sub-Saharan Africa currently up to 50% of people living with HIV will develop TB—they are 30 times more likely to develop active TB. Multi-Drug Resistant (MDR) TB, including Extensively Drug Resistant (XDR) TB, is poised to become the next pandemic—and already has frighteningly high mortality amongst people with HIV. An effective response must be mobilized immediately.

*We understand that, if universal access to existing high quality TB/HIV care and services were available by 2015, we could likely cut the current mortality rates by 80%--saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people each year. *As a matter of urgency, we call upon governments of the world to move beyond declarations and provide the /plans/, the /resources/, and the /effective programs/ to stop these intertwined pandemics.